With the spectacular growth of Draw Something there’s been renewed chatter about whether Twitter is a viable platform for other products to grow on. Draw Some, after all, at least partly attributes their unprecedented growth to Twitter.
Will we finally be able to see a product grow and monetize with Twitter as its primary communication channel? Does Draw Some hold any lessons for other non-game products being able to use Twitter for growth and retention?
First, let’s establish what we need from a channel. To oversimplify, we want two things from “virality”:
1. The ability to acquire new users
2. The ability to retain current users
For example email offers both of these since I can invite a new user to the service, or bring a current user back by, say, letting them know that a friend just posted a picture of
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The iCache Geode is the best attack I’ve seen yet at eliminating your wallet in a more incremental approach. A rewritable credit card that becomes any card you need, and an eink display that stores all your loyalty cards — all in an iPhone case.
Can’t wait to try it.
Faraday - continuing the quest for minimal -
Following on the footsteps of Clear’s wonderfully minimal todo list app. Faraday gives the clean treatment to calendars.
I prefer this approach so much more than the current Apple “faux-real” textures.
While on vacation last week Megan and I spent a day in the town of Ashcroft, Colorado. Actually, calling it a town is a bit of an overstatement. It’s a deserted valley with a few houses and one (great) restaurant that you have to snowshoe 45 minutes to get to because the road is closed in winter.
As we are packing up the car and I’m trying to not think about civilization, suddenly a UPS truck driver goes by. My thought: “Holy crap, I can get 2-day free shipping from Amazon even here!?”
For me and probably for you as well, Amazon Prime had a pretty dramatic effect on my online buying habits. It converted an ecommerce storefront into an impulse purchase site. I spend a lot of time thinking about customer funnels and product friction, and still I just
Come on founders, get to work -
Someone had to say it. I have always said, building a business is a lot harder than starting most people think. “I’m worried that in all the hype, in all the “we launched our company” events, and “we changed our name again” parties, and “we redid our website – come celebrate!” shindigs, and the SXSW […]
(Source: om.co)
The new version of OSX that Apple announced today feels like it could strangely make the Mac as valuable a channel for games as Facebook or the iPhone.
I say strangely because the Mac has typically been a backwater for games. Even with the the launch of an App Store, transition to Intel chips, and Steam coming to the Mac it remains a distant second fiddle to the PC which is itself in decline. For example if you want to play two of the largest releases of the last year, Skyrm or Star Wars: The Old Republic, you’re out of luck on a Mac. For casual players, it’s not like you see Cityville or even Cut the Rope rising up the Mac App Store charts (notwithstanding Angry Birds “everywhere no matter what” strategy).
But two features of the upcoming Mountain Lion could change this in very rapid and dramatic fashion, depending on how they are implemented. Basically, this is what I’m seeing:
Step 1: Game Center knows who you are
The big news today for gamers is that Game Center, the multiplayer identity & leaderboard app that is available on the iPhone/iPad is coming to Mac. This should enable cross platform play between not only different Macs, but also between Macs & iPhones. It’s not a particularly great user interface, but a key here is that by logging into Game Center to display your scores, games will have a cross-platform, cross-game identification system not dissimilar to Facebook.
This will let you build games around identity, the same way that it’s important that Word with Friends knows who you and your friends are to let you play together.
Step 2: Notification Center as Facebook requests
The second feature, Notification Center, if done correctly will arguably have a much more important impact on games, potentially creating a disruptive opportunity. The feature, which is basically a port of the notification tray on the iPhone (or a copy of Growl depending on your preference) will provide the single feature that makes gaming on the iphone & facebook so different from PC gaming. The game can let you know when something happens worth paying attention to.
This is similar to the request channel on Facebook (for installed users of course), with one big difference — you don’t need to be on Facebook. You just need to have your computer on.
Yes this also opens up potential for abuse, but the implementation allows for games like Words with Friends to be viable on the platform since you can finally reach out and say “Fred spelled ‘Peuter’ in Words with Friends, take your turn” and that makes a huge difference to the engagement, and therefore success, of a social game.
The bonus step 3 could be if the Messages-to-Twitter integration is smooth enough that it becomes a viable viral channel for games on the Mac. That’s unlikely, at least at first, but regardless this amount of reach will have a big difference for games that plan to take advantage of the Mac App Store / Game Center / Messages combination.
(full disclosure: I talked about a Zynga product and, yeah, i own zynga stock)
Like seemingly everyone else in the tech blogosphere, I’ve been playing with Clear, a new personal organization app from Realmac Software, for the past few weeks.Super simple. Slick UI that’s bound to be copied quite a bit. Lovely.
Macstories, The Next Web, SiliconFilter, and TechCrunch have solid reviews.
(Disclosure: CrunchFund is an investor in Orchestra, a competitor to Clear.)
(Source: parislemon)
Seemed appropriate somehow.
Today I’m thrilled to say I’m joining the team at Spark, making the switch from entrepreneur to investor. I’ve known the guys at Spark for years and have admired the unique approach, and the unqualified success they have had. This is a big switch for me, but made easier by working with close friends that I respect.
As you could imagine I thought about this decision rather carefully. I’ve been an entrepreneur as long as I’ve been anything, and I still have boundless energy to work in startups. For me it felt like time to see if I could shift my focus from building a single company to impacting the broader ecosystem.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m a deep believer in startup culture. Not the “startup scene” - who cares about that really - but the engine of learning, risk, and ownership culture that draws so many of us in. Thankfully that ecosystem feels really healthy right now, with more companies starting, and more angels supporting them, in those early days.
As more startups are getting started, the friction has shifted up a level. We need for entrepreneurs to be able to stick with a startup, become CEOs, figure out how their product development scales, and get past the “initial traction” phase. Its a difficult transition, one that I struggled with in my twenties at internetsoccer/Teamtalk, as the company grew from 6 to 300 in a little over a year. More recently for a little under two years at Zynga this same question of how to scale while still being able to maintain an entrepreneurial culture was a constant focus.
Becoming an investor for me feels like allowing myself to work full time on the things I’m already obsessed with. Getting to partner with great entrepreneurs, work with a great team, and making startup growth my field of study.